The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  ‘Yes, quite,’ said Cormac with irony.

  Mika acknowledged his tone and went on, ‘Only by damaging its body so severely did you manage to take it beyond its ability for self-repair.’

  ‘We don’t possess anything like that.’

  ‘No, I would say its source is Jain, as our own nano-technologies are just nowhere near as advanced.’ She gestured to the artefacts. ‘Though I have to wonder if they are that source.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘From what little I’ve learnt from them I know that they are Jain, but they’re severely corrupted, and I wonder if any more could be discovered from them than we’d learn from a pot shard about the full extent of the Roman civilization.’

  ‘Then Skellor has something else.’

  ‘One would think so,’ replied Mika, gazing past his shoulder to the laboratory’s door. He glanced back and saw that Scar had entered and now stood waiting with the usual reptilian patience. Mika continued, ‘Of course you can ask him yourself once he’s found.’

  Cormac snorted at that. ‘If we find him.’

  ‘He won’t be able to hide down there on Callorum forever, and the remote sensors Occam dropped will pick up any ship that leaves or arrives,’ said Mika.

  ‘You’re forgetting his chameleonware. I guarantee he has a ship stashed somewhere on the surface, which he’ll be able to leave on without being detected,’ opined Cormac. He turned to Scar, ‘What do you want here, dracoman?’

  ‘It is not a case of what he wants,’ said Mika, standing and moving past Cormac. ‘Come in, Scar. Let’s start where we left off.’

  Cormac had also not forgotten Mika’s fascination with dracomen . . . and Dragon. That, besides her expertise, was the reason he had brought her along.

  The Occam Razor came out of underspace five hours earlier than expected, some time after most of the crew had gone into cold-sleep, but before Cormac himself felt the inclination. In a pensive mood since his encounter with Blegg and his discussion with Mika, he immediately demanded to know the nature of the problem. Occam took a moment to reply as it was not a very co-operative AI.

  ‘Distress call,’ was all it said to him.

  Cormac tossed aside the note screen he had been studying, got off his bed and quickly pulled on his shipsuit and exited the cabin. Perhaps Tomalon might have more to say. Reaching the nearest drop-shaft, he keyed in the deck level from which the bridge pod had previously extended, then he stepped in. On the requisite deck, he quickly found one of the ubiquitous drones, and asked it for directions. Luckily, Occam had not shifted the bridge pod, and soon Cormac was there.

  ‘What have you got?’

  Tomalon turned towards him blinking to clear his eyes of the views projected through his link with the ship’s sensors. Cormac wondered what it was like – flying the ship, being the ship.

  ‘A landing craft. Looks to be of Masadan manufacture. Life signs evident just for one person, though there may be others in cold-sleep.’ He nodded to one of the windows and up flickered a view of a battered-looking craft with one of the Occam’s grabships heading towards it. This unknown craft was a much smaller version of those ships used to tow asteroids to Elysium.

  ‘The distress signal, what format?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Standard Polity.’

  ‘Strange.’

  The grabship closed on the landing craft like some huge metallic tick, its triple claw unfolding spiderish against the actinic glare of the stars. Slowing to match the speed of the craft and adjusting to match its rotation, the grabship closed its claw and gripped before speeding back to the Occam. When it filled the screen, another view was cast up, from one side, of the grabship decelerating into the maw of a hold: a wasp with captured grub, flying into a hole in the wall of a house. As the hold irised shut behind it, Cormac glanced at Tomalon, who lifted a hand almost concealed in linking technology and gestured to the drone that had just entered.

  ‘I’ll take you there,’ he said.

  So that was how much he identified with the ship.

  ‘Have Cento and Aiden meet us there, armed,’ said Cormac, turning to go.

  Tomalon nodded and his eyes went opaque again. The drone turned in midair and led Cormac out. Tomalon was leading him, or the AI, or likely an amalgam of the two.

  Was I like that? It had been years since Cormac had been gridlinked, and then he had been variously linked with a series of different AIs. Still, it had dehumanized him, hadn’t it?

  With the gas giant in its position – at this time of year – of leading the sun by only one quarter-day, Eldene knew, when Calypse disappeared behind the far horizon, that darkness was only a few hours away. When workers headed down the rows of grape trees, carrying the backpack sprays they had been working with all day, Fethan changed course to take the two of them away from any encounter. The sky changed from lavender to deep purple then starlit black, and one of the giant’s moons hurtled across above wisps of cloud as if late for an appointment with its Jovian father. Shortly they reached another of the tool sheds they had earlier seen, and Fethan broke into it.

  ‘Don’t move from here unless you really have to,’ Fethan instructed her, handing over Volus’s stinger. ‘I’m going to find some supplies.’ Fethan winked and slipped out of the door.

  Eldene was too tired to protest and, pulling the tarpaulin from a dilapidated electric tractor, found the darkest corner, wrapped herself in the material and bedded down. But all her discomforts conspired to keep her awake: the strange lightness she felt without her scole, the sensitivity of her nipples from where, unsupported by the creature, they had been rubbing against her shirt, the itching pain in her chest where its feeding tubules had penetrated, and the discomfort of having to use a breather unit. Instead of sleeping, she lay back and replayed the long question-and-answer session of that day.

  Unlike the tutors at the orphanage, Fethan answered her every question succinctly and never lost patience. Eldene now visualized such wonders as runcibles, Polity battleships, wondrous Earth and the heavily populated Sol system, strange environments adapted for human use, and humans adapted to live in strange environments. She contemplated the idea of godlike AI minds wiser and more intelligent than anything she could have possibly imagined before, of medical technologies that seemed capable of extending people’s lives indefinitely . . . the strange creatures and stranger technologies and constructs . . . No, sleep just did not seem possible with all these golden visions playing across her retina. Then the next thing she knew she couldn’t breathe, and was scrabbling in the darkness of midnight to find the spare oxygen bottle.

  ‘All right, girl,’ said Fethan from beside her, with swift precision changing the bottle for her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, as soon as her breathing was back to normal.

  ‘You go back to sleep.’

  She was about to say something else to him, but with seemingly no transition, Fethan was shaking her by the shoulder and light was beaming in through cracks in the grapewood walls of the tool shed.

  Eldene lay there for a moment longer, as she felt so warm and comfortable in the tarpaulin, but then habit beaten into her at the orphanage, and further reinforced by the proctors in the work sheds, had her struggling from the tarpaulin and to her feet.

  ‘Were you gone long . . . in the night?’ she asked, hinging her mask down in irritation.

  ‘Few hours,’ Fethan replied, squatting down to open a large pack resting against the wheel of the electric tractor. From this he held up another oxygen bottle and showed it to Eldene before placing it on the floor.

  After taking another quick breath from the mask Eldene asked, ‘Did you get any sleep?’, then could have kicked herself for her stupidity, and was grateful when Fethan offered no patronizing reply.

  What came out of the pack next, Eldene smelt before Fethan revealed it to her, and, with her mouth watering, she approached almost involuntarily.

  ‘Sausage,’ she said reverently as Fethan handed her the huge tube of
meat, then shortly removed a loaf followed by a four-pack of wine bottles.

  ‘Remember, this has gotta last you four days,’ said Fethan.

  Eldene heard him, but was too busy relishing her first mouthful of meat in something like four months. She followed this with bread, then with a swallow of wine – something she had tasted a couple of times back at the orphanage. Eating was a rather vexing process with the mask, and Eldene could see why the thing was disposable – no doubt it very quickly became quite filthy.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ she asked, finally pausing to take the water bottle Fethan handed her.

  ‘There’s a lot of Voluses in the world, though this morning there’s one less,’ Fethan replied.

  Eldene stared at him in the dim light of the tool shed as she tried to adjust to the casual killing of yet another proctor for oxygen, food and drink. It came as no surprise to her that such adjustment did not require much effort. She took another bite of sausage, another swallow of wine.

  Once Eldene had eaten, and recorked the bottle of wine, having only drunk a quarter of it – she well understood how drinking too much would affect her, having never acquired any tolerance of alcohol, and having experienced the effects of Fethan’s lethal brew back at the work sheds – they set out into the new day. Calypse was high in the sky, so they were an hour or more beyond the customary starting time for workers, but none were in sight nor came in sight before the pair reached the fringe of the orchards.

  ‘Why did you brew alcohol if you never needed it?’ Eldene asked, as heading through flute grass they skirted a wide area of square ponds where workers were scattered like pawns.

  ‘I brewed it because I could, and it gave some of the team there some comfort,’ Fethan replied.

  ‘They’d have more comfort not still being there.’

  ‘Yes, but how many breather masks do you think I could obtain for them?’

  Chastened, Eldene now saved her breath for walking. The new growths of grass, like spikes of green metal tipped with blood, were now a hand’s length high and it was walking through these that became difficult. The tall growths of last year were becoming increasingly brittle, however, and disintegrated almost at a touch.

  By mid-morning, with both the sun and Calypse well up in the sky, they rested upon a huge tricone shell that was buoyed up by the flute grass rhizomes. This monster shell was three metres long and wide enough at its widest end for Eldene to sit on it without her feet touching the ground. Here she sat drinking water and eating a piece of bread while Fethan walked slowly around the shell itself studying the ancient graffiti carved into its nacreous surface.

  ‘I never knew they got to be this big,’ said Eldene, around a mouthful of bread.

  ‘Neither did I, but then I wouldn’t, as the only ecological survey recorded on the AI net is about three hundred years old and was not produced by the most reliable of sources.’ Fethan paused with arms akimbo and transferred his gaze up to the sky. Then suddenly, moving very fast, he caught Eldene by the arm, half carrying and half shoving her off the end of the shell. ‘Get inside! Right now!’

  Eldene caught a glimpse of things glinting in the sky as she hurriedly obeyed, Fethan diving into the cone next to her. Once safely inside, she tilted her head to the drone of turbines and immediately recognized the source: a military transport was passing right over them. She risked peeking her head out for a look. The transport was just a huge flat rectangular box with windows down each side, one thruster mounted on a rear tail fin, two air rudders depending below the front two corners, and underneath, the two huge turbines that kept it in the air. The blast from these engines raised a wake of fragments from the dead flute grass below, and the noise was deafening. Accompanying this massive vehicle was a veritable swarm of aerofans. She glanced aside to see Fethan watching the sky as well.

  ‘Still no AG on their transports; Lellan’s ahead of them on that,’ he said.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Eldene whispered, though she then wondered why she bothered to keep her voice down – the proctors could not have heard her over the racket generated by the transport’s engines.

  ‘Might be because two proctors have been killed in as many days, but I doubt that,’ said Fethan. ‘The Theocracy don’t care so much for their proctors that they’d mobilize a transport. So I’d say Lellan’s been stinging their arses – probably with a supply or worker raid. She likes to keep the bastards on their toes.’

  ‘Worker raid?’ Eldene queried as the flight faded into the distance and she and Fethan finally crawled from cover.

  ‘She’ll normally select a work camp, go in with a transport just like that one, and liberate the lot of them. The only ones in the camp who object are usually the proctors, and their objections last only so long as it takes ’em to hit the ground. Lellan’s not what you’d call reasonable when it comes to proctors.’

  ‘What about the lasers?’ Eldene gestured to the sky.

  ‘There are occasional windows of opportunity – when things can be done on the surface unseen. Before now Lellan has also stolen Theocracy transports and their radio identification codes. It’s not something she gets away with very often, but when she does she makes the most of it.’

  They moved on through the flute grass.

  Cento, Aiden and Gant met him as he stepped from the drop-shaft nearest the hold containing the craft. This hold was positioned over a kilometre from the bridge pod. Cormac noted that the two original Golem were in uniform and carried their JMC military-issue pulse-guns. Their expressions were unreadable. By contrast, Gant, whom Cormac was still loath to describe as a Golem, was not in uniform – it looked as if he had hurriedly dressed in whatever was to hand – however, he did carry the same weapon as the other two. Cormac made no comment on his presence. If he was out to prove something here, then let him do so.

  ‘Scan shows only one person in there. There may be others in cold-sleep or undetected by scan. Stay alert. I want at least one alive if possible.’

  ‘Aren’t we a little over-armed for this?’ asked Gant.

  ‘Recommend the softer approach when you’ve got something to lose,’ Cormac reminded him.

  Gant muttered something filthy and fingered his gun. The drone led them through a sliding door into a cavernous hold, where the landing craft rested at the centre of a plain of ceramal deck plates. The grabship had returned to its rack position in a row of ten against the wall – they looked like giant metal insects clinging to a cliff. As he stepped through the door Cormac studied the captured craft.

  It was of an old utile design much used before the introduction of cheap antigravity motors. Its body was a flattened cylinder terminating in a chainglass cockpit, behind which, like shoulders, were two ball-mounted thruster motors capable of firing in any direction. At the rear of the craft, behind another pair of thrusters, were two huge ion engines extruding outwards from the craft, these in appearance being simply two large spheres with the rears sliced off them. It had no landing feet let down and so lay flat on the deck.

  The drone accelerated away from them to do one circuit of the craft, then hovered above its airlock which lay between the thrusters on one side. When they finally joined it, Cormac directed Cento and Aiden to the lock itself, not daring yet to touch this craft himself for standing before it was like standing before the open door of a freezer. Cento took hold of the manual wheel and turned it easily. There was a slight rush of air as pressures equalized, and when this door was open far enough, Aiden moved into the lock to release the inner door. Cento quickly followed him in with his pulse-gun ready. Cormac followed on with Gant.

  Inside the craft, a skinny youth with bright yellow skin lay flat on his back, with Cento bent over him. Cormac took in the situation in a second and shouted to the drone.

  ‘Drop the gravity – to five per cent, now!’

  There was a moment’s delay, enough for Aiden to step back into the main body of the craft from the cockpit, which he had been checking out. Cormac’s sto
mach lurched as the gravity changed. He glanced round and saw Gant rising slowly into the air, his embarrassment evident, then returned his attention to Cento.

  ‘Outlinker, unconscious, fractured ankle,’ the Golem announced after a brief pause.

  ‘There’s another in one of the cold-coffins: a woman. But the manifest numbers twenty-five on this craft,’ said Aiden.

  ‘They’re not here?’ Cormac asked needlessly. He did not see Aiden shake his head. An Outlinker on a Masadan landing craft, now what did that mean?

  ‘How long, do you think, before I can speak to him?’ he asked Cento, who was probing the youth’s ankle.

  ‘I’ll get him up to Medical, and thereafter it will be Mika’s decision.’

  Cormac nodded and stepped back into the airlock. The drone rapidly backed out of his way into the hold.

  ‘Tomalon, I’d like you to hold position until this is sorted. We could then get a better idea of what we’re flying into.’

  The drone said, ‘You do not command this ship.’

  ‘I know,’ Cormac replied.

  ‘I can give you twenty hours.’

  Apis Coolant was conscious in three.

  Skellor tracked her as she strode along the walkway, then started to move in after she sent about their business the three drones accompanying her. He wondered for a moment just what sort of ship this was that required human maintenance personnel, then understood that the craft had to be old – perhaps something left over from one of the many conflicts during the early expansion of the Polity. That meant that its AI would not be such a godlike entity as the newer Polity AIs and therefore much of the ship was outside its control – hence the human maintenance personnel. It also meant that this ship probably had an interfaced captain, and perhaps even a command crew. Not knowing his own capabilities just yet, Skellor could not judge whether this would make his task more or less difficult.